MISCELLANEOUS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 3184, 20 April 1872, Page 3

MISCELLANEOUS.

Small-pox is on the increase in Leeds. The National Rifle Association has 3146 members.

Immense quantities of eggs are being imported into Scotland from France.

One of Dickens's sons has just taken a wranglership at Cambridge; Iron ore of excellent quaUty is reported to have been discovered in Dorsetshire.

M. Thiers, according to the Spectator, " is as * firm 'as a pig, and as clever as a fox."

The number of Communist prisoners set free up to the beginning of February was 17,158. The total value of the diamonds exported from the Cape during 1871, was £1,500,000. General Chesney,. the pioneer of the overland route to India, died on January 30, aged 83.

The, sales of cotton" at Liverpool on Jan. 31 reached the unprecedented figure of 35,000 bales.

The total value of the property assessed to the poor rate throughout England is £104,420,283.

It is rumoured in London that Mr Lowe's next Budget will show a surplus of £2,000,000.

A sea-going training ship .for boys and seamen is about to be commissioned by the Admiralty. • .'■ ;■ The adoption of the nine-hours system in Birmingham has led to a rise in the price of coal there.

The English papers report numerous cases of persons summoned for refusing to pay school rates.

The famine in Persia is [still as bad as ever, and the mortality is said to be, if possible, increasing. Mr Bradlaugh was refused the use of the Sheffield Town Hall for his lecture on the House of Lords.

A Sheffield magistrate has been fined for a breach of the Factory -Act by employing girls after 8 p.m. The prevalent feature of the present fashions in England is stated by Le Follet to be " quiet luxury." A Bill for the protection of elephants from extermination has been introduced into the .Madras Legislature. Colonel Tomline, M.P., lately declared that London pauperism was " imperilling the institutions of tlie country.?' The floods in several of the English rivers in the end of January are said to have been almost unprecedented. The late Finance Minister of Switzerland has been sentenced to four years' penal servitude for fraudulent acts.

MrLecky,the celebrated Rationalist, is in Florence, gathering materials for a second volume on European morals. A limited liability company has been formed for the purpose of building a new theatre and opera-house for Aberdeen. At Rotherham a boy drowned himself tlirough fear that his mother would beat him for losing some parcels of groceries. A public meeting at Dundee passed a resolution in favour of the Government taking over all tKe railways in the country. Sir W. Gull, one of the doctors who attended the Prince of Wales during his illness, has purchased an estate, in Morayshire.

While riding with the Warwickshire hounds, Lord St. Lawrence was thrown from his horse and had one of his arms broken.

The French Assembly has decreed a duty of 10 per cent, on the price of all tickets for theatres and other'places of public amusement.

A committee of Brussels ladies are reported to be subscribing to purchase a palace there for the Pope, should he see fit to leave Rome.

According to Lord Derby, so' far as regards economy and prudence among its people, Great Britain stands rather low on the list of nations.

Among the conscience money lately acknowledged by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was £100 " sent at the request of a dying man." Some "tea" was offered for sale in London the other day at 1-jrd per lb., exclusive of the duty, and did not find purchasers even at that figure. There was a grand fancy ball in Glasgow in the end of Januaiy, the first since 1841. The Citizen describes it as a scene of almost Arabian enchantment.'

Admiral Carnegie has-obtained" a divorce from his . wife, a daughter of Mr Adrian Hope, on the ground of her adultery with an attach^ of the French embassy.

The Spectator says that the jury in the Tichborne case "has shown at least as much knowledge and judgment as the Bar, and a good deal more than the Bench."

The long-expected survey of Palestine has at last been fairly commenced. Captain Stewart, the officer in charge, began his operations immediately on Ms arrival in December.

Tlie measures lately rendered necessary in consequence of the prevalence of fever and small-pox in Edinburgh, have entailed on the city an expenditure of £1000 per month. The following somewhat ambiguous paragraph appeared in an Edinburgh paper :—" We regret to find that the announcement of the death of Mr W. is a malicious fabrication."

At Newton Abbott, Devon, a lady fell into the river, and was carried by the current through the tunnel under the town, being rescued alive on emerging from the tunnel at the other end.

The French anti-tobacco association is widening the field of its operations, and now includes alcoholic liquors among the abuses which it aims at remedying. This is the first temperance society established in France.

It is stated that symptoms of foot-and-mouth disease appeared the other week among a colony of ten cats in one house in Forres, which were all living on warm cow milk from a farm in the neighbourhood.

Professor Blackie, in a recent speech, said that Burns and Walter Scott have had the distinguished honour of making the world take off its hat to the name of Scotchmen and Scotland wherever it is pronounced.

In consequence of cases of successful SAvindling having of late increased, an ofiice has just been opened in London for the purpose of concentrating all information obtainable as regards the doing of swindlers, and to record it. A London barmaid lately killed herself by jumping from a high AvindoAV ; and next morning a man known as a constant customer at the tavern where she was employed, droAvned himself by jumping from Blackfriars Bridge. It is stated that a solicitor of Hexham has received instructions to renew the actions of ejectment on behalf of the Countess of Derwentwater, and funds have been provided to try the actions on the Tichborne case being concluded. The Shetlanders in- Unst received a great godsend last Christmas in the shape of a shoal of bottle-nosed whales, which Avere driven ashore and captured. About the same time the inhabitants of the Isle of Burray succeeded in taking 290 of those whales in tAvo days, and they Avere sold for £535 by public roup. An American writer, Kate Field, in " Pen Photographs of Charles Dickens," says that when Dickens gave his first "Readings" in Boston, persons Avishing for tickets began to assemble at half-past seven in the previous evening, and that before midnight there Avere hundreds in lme. The doors of the ticket-office were not to be opened till'half-past eight tlie f olloAving morning. A wild scene is reported to have occurred in the French Assembly. The Deputy Naquet, a member of tlie Ex-! treme Left, brought forward a motion1 denouncing the Emperor for the war, and employed very strong language, calling him "M. Louis Bonaparte," and a traitor to France. He proposed that all the property of the Imperial family should be confiscated. The proposal was received -with hooting and shouts of derision, and only 20 hands were held up in its favour. Mr Croker plausibly maintained that it was impossible to be a great man without being a good sleeper—his favourite examples being Napoleon, Pitt, and Wellington. He might have added Sir Walter Scott. Sir Henry Holland, the celebrated physician, says that, when sleep is desired and reading resorted to, the sonnet is the most effective soporific, in whatever language it may be written. The Quarterly Review gives the preference to the epic in blank verse. Sydney Smith prescribed a sermon.

A correspondent of an English paper writes:—-"I have had occasion of late to traverse slowly a considerable portion France, and have come in contact with people of all conditions and classes. It is a melancholy fact that as you approach intelligent and educated minds in the French nation, you find discouragement, despondency, and disenchantment, often a quite horribly lucid consciousness of decay, unaccompanied by any energy to correct evils ; while as you draw away into the masses you encounter the old spasmodic, frenzied, and gasconading selfconfidence. Of the two phenomena, the former is to me the saddest."

A correspondent of the. Banffshire Journal gives an account of some strange religious proceedings at Cuminestown, a village nca? Turriff, in Aberdeenshire. The entl.ns.asts have what they call a heavenly dance. One of them, armed with a hammer, mallet, or stick, beats time, while another halloos loudly and leads the heavenly dance. The noises to the neighbours and passers-by are sometimes frightful. Along with these manifestations there are lofty pretensions and claims on the part of the poor people to be enlightened guides and teachers. The liquidators of Overend, Gurney, and Co. have just issued their annual rer port. They state that the whole of the ascertained indebtedless of the concern, with the exception of a few thousand pounds, has been discharged, the three calls having been paid in full on a large proportion of shares. The liquidators further state that one class of assets, which was estimated to yield £232,000, realised only £150,000, and that a second class, estimated to produce £366,000, yielded only £28,000. Professor "Kespighi, an Italian astronomer, has discovered that surrounding the sun to a depth of nearly two hundred thousand miles, reaching, therefore, above the loftiest prominences, there is an atmosphere consisting of glowing hy drogen, and of some other vapour distinct in condition and composition from the chromatosphere, whose average height is about four thousand miles. This enormous external atmospheric shell must be of exceeding rarity. It is outside this atmosphere that the radiated corona projects into the sun-surrounding space to distances often exceeding a million miles. ,

A young lady at Dundee has hit upon a novel method of putting her leap-year privileges into practice. Being at one of the Free Kirks in that city on a late Sunday she dropped into the collection plate, held by an unmarried elder, not a bent sixpence, or any other well-known token of affection, but a lozenge, on which was imprinted the touching legend, " Without thy love I cannot live." Report does not say whether the elder in question was sufficiently impressed with the impending catastrophe to take pity on the young lady, or whetner he incontinently eat up the lozenge and thought no more about it. .

Sirangees paying a visit to Dunedin are often at a loss to know what is the best establishment to visit for the purchase of drapery and clothing. Herbert, Haynes, and Co. one special advantages to the public that can be met with nowhere else in the city. They keep at all times the largest and best assorted stock of every class of goods, imported direct from the leading manufacturers and warehousemen at home, which being bought entirely upon cash terms, they are enabled to offer goods of such sterling value as cannot be equalled by any other house in the trade: Every article in stock is marked at a fixed price for ready money, from which no abatement is ever made, so that the most inexperienced buy their goods at the same prices as the best judges. Their terms are—net cash, without discount or reductions of any kind. A fuller description of their stock ill be found in an advertisement on the first page of this paper.— Advt.]